Philida Page 16

  THE FIRST WEEKS after she arrives in Worcester, Philida has enough opportunity to study the house and its occupants. It is very different from Zandvliet. After the longhouse she was used to, Master de la Bat’s house is quite squat, although it is bigger than most of the other homes in the little dorp. There is no gable. But the walls are high for shade in summer, and the ceilings are made of rushes. There is a voorhuis to the right when one enters, two smallish bedrooms left, and a kitchen and pantry at the back. In the backyard are a few barns, a dairy, a wine cellar and three outrooms for servants. At the moment the one in the middle is filled with mealie bags, chests and barrels; to the left there is one for the slave Labyn from Batavia, who does carpentry and sometimes works for other people too; in the third, slightly bigger outroom, the housemaid Delphina sleeps and that is where Philida and her children also move in.

  In the beginning she feels constantly ill at ease. She knows exactly why. It is because her shadow has not come with her. Somewhere in the clouds and misty rain on the long road between Zandvliet and this new town on this side of the mountains the sun got lost, and when she arrived here and the sun heated up again, there were shadows once more, but not the sun she was used to. Especially in the evenings she felt the need to crawl in with her own shadow, to find a space for it to lie behind her back, but it wasn’t the one she was looking for. There was no chance to fit in properly any more.

  She just has to get used to it. But getting used to a place doesn’t mean that you have found the place that is really yours. This was what she felt at the auction: that something had moved in between what she knew and what was foreign to her.

  It isn’t that she feels dissatisfied or unhappy. In many ways this is a better place than Zandvliet. Easier, even friendlier. This Nooi isn’t always picking on her, she never orders one to undo a piece of knitting, never comes with a riem or a switch. Meester Bernabé de la Bat isn’t moody or difficult. After the pesky Brinks he not only leaves her in peace but tries in his own way to make her feel at home.

  Good in his own way, yes. Meester Bernabé de la Bat is not a man of many words, nor a tall man with a short fuse. Actually one never knows what is going on in his head. A long head, his hair combed flat on his scalp, his eyes behind the thick glasses always rather worried, almost apprehensive, as if he never feels sure that someone is going to scold him or find him ridiculous. An important man, Philida heard from Delphina. So important, one may get the idea that he thinks from her knees up a woman’s legs are joined together. The first lawyer this town has ever known, they say. Lawyer? That, says Delphina, a small quick girl, bright as a mouse, means a man who knows the law, to whom you can go if you have problems. But not like a father or an older brother; even to his two children he is always aloof and rather distant, not a man for jokes or games, as serious as a secretary bird, with the same stiff steps as if he is always worried that he may tread on shit.

  This man is married to one Anna Catherina Hugo, a quiet person, like a duck that got chased from her nest too quickly, but a member of one of the top families at the Caab, as Delphina can tell. At the time Philida arrives, they have two small pale boys, three years and one year old, with another one pushing up a molehill from inside.

  From Delphina Philida often asks advice when she is not quite sure what to do. Delphina is a bit older than she, people say that in her young days she had a hard time with a baas at the Caab. Three of them, actually, because the man and his two sons were bothered by their pricks and were always ready with a riem if you hesitated to lie down with them, and it was just as well that their seed didn’t take on her, as she always sought timely advice from other slave women to get rid of their leftovers if she began to swell. But Delphina isn’t much of a talker. If she has to sweep a floor, she will sweep; if she has to wash up plates, she washes up plates; and if she is ordered to bathe the two pale boys in the zinc bath she bathes the boys in the zinc bath; nothing can ever upset her routine and she doesn’t like loose talk. Her small tight body warns you at first glance to let her be. Only once she’s learned to trust you, her tongue loosens up.

  As a result Labyn is the one Philida usually comes to talk to. He could have been her father, the father she has never known, and with him she feels safe. A peaceful man who takes his time with everything, and is always to be found with his calabash pipe in his mouth. Where he plucks the leaves to smoke, Philida never discovers; and when she asks him, he just looks at her with a small, pursed smile and gives no answer, but they are sweet-smelling leaves and that is another reason why she likes to go and sit with him when she has no work to do or when her knitting doesn’t need close attention.

  To see him working on a piece of wood gives one a special deep pleasure inside. He must be, she often thinks, like the father of Jesus, the only other carpenter she has heard of. He has a deep kind of respect for wood, each piece is different, each one he comes to know intimately. Yellowwood, young and creamy white, or older, a deep yellow like butter, later even darker, like burnt sugar; the heavy stinkwood with its fine grain that comes alive under your fingers, camphor wood that sets free its smell when you saw or shave it; wild olive with its stains and curves; kiaat from Batavia, walnut, cedarwood, cherrywood, ironwood, wood for chairs or benches or tables, wood for wagon wheels or yokes or yoke-pins, wood for a jonkmanskas or an armoire, wood for hedgepoles, wood you can feel or judge with your fingers or the inside of your wrists or with your cheeks, wood with which you can have long conversations. With wood, she discovers from Labyn, it is like talking to family: Do you by chance know this one or that one? Isn’t he an uncle or a cousin or a grandchild of so-and-so? His mother must have been a de Villiers girl, or a Basson or a de Wet, married to a Pieterse or a Swanepoel, one of the step-aunts must have been a Lamprecht or a van der Merwe, his great-grandfather came from Borneo on a three-master. And then there is wood for coffins. Those are Labyn’s special love, and each coffin becomes a cherished chest in which he himself would love to spend the rest of his days when there are no more days to spend.

  One late evening when neither of them can sleep, they lie talking for hours on their palliasses of straw or rags in the heavy dark still fragrant with the early evening’s candlewax, Delphina tells her that in his youth Labyn had a young wife, Lavinia, whom he loved very dearly. But she was impossibly beautiful and the white men of the Caab wouldn’t leave her in peace. From the smart houses in the Heerengracht or Oranjezicht, or from the taverns, from the workmen’s houses on Caledon Square or closer to the beach, or from the Rondebosch to the far side of the mountain or at Hout Bay, or even from the deep interior when the men came to the Caab to buy and sell, from high and mighty lords to scruffy looters or ruffians and drunkards. In the Lodge on the Heerengracht, just this side of the old Company Gardens, she always had strings of visitors. She tried her best to ward them off, but for how long could a slave girl say no? What she did was to tell them she was already married, and she didn’t lie with any other man because her husband was a real devil who readily ran amok and he’d already throttled three or four people with his bare hands. If they wanted to know more about this husband or if they threatened to kill her when she refused to talk, she started telling them that the man was Labyn, who’d come with her from Batavia, thinking that this would put an end to it. But what they did then was to round up five or six of their mates to catch Labyn on the Boereplein late one Saturday night and beat him senseless and cut off his balls. The same five or six men who’d attacked Labyn lay in wait for her at the women’s washing place up against the Table Mountain and did terrible things to her and then just left her lying there, where some predator got hold of what was left of her in the night and finished her off.

  In the end Labyn survived, but he was no longer what he’d been before, and in the end his Baas sold him upcountry, and that was how he came to Bernabé de la Bat, far from the Caab, far from Lavinia, and all he had left was his carpentry, and his coffins remained much sought after. What also drew people to him was his
storytelling. Which, more than anything else, was what caught Philida’s interest. And of course the fact that the two children, even the baby, so soon became infatuated with him while he became an oupa for them. Stories she’d known since childhood were retold by him, the one about the Water Women, the one about the snake with the shiny stone on his forehead, the one about the woman who had an eye on her big toe, the one about the Ouman with fire in his arsehole; and also a whole bagful of others. Some he’d brought from Batavia, others he’d picked up on the ship during the sea voyage. Still others the wind had blown to him in this Colony. A number of them he’d probably made up. His stories were put together the way he made furniture from wood, furniture to which he became so attached that he found it almost unbearable to sell it, and even then it would be only when there was really no other way out.

  One night just a short while after Philida arrived in the village, Meester Bernabé de la Bat comes to the room of the women slaves to tell them they have to get up very early the next morning, he is taking Philida to the Bokkeveld. For what? He has to visit one of the farms and wants to use the opportunity to show her something important.

  For a moment she feels annoyed. Meester de la Bat may not be a Brink, but they are both white and neither of them ever says anything he doesn’t want to say. She can feel her lips twitching, but says nothing.

  And what about the children? she asks after a while.

  They can come along, he says.

  But when she discusses it with Delphina later, the woman says, Don’t worry, it’s easier for the children to stay behind. She has an idea of what is coming. It’s something he does with all his slaves. She, Delphina, will look after the little ones. It will be better for them to be here, rather than go all the way to the Bokkeveld. So early the next morning Philida goes off with Labyn and Meester de la Bat.

  It is a terribly long way, and on the Cape cart it is a rough ride, but Labyn is a capable driver. They have to go past many places. The Sand River and the Wabooms River and Romans River. Then Vaalvlei and De Liefde and Waveren and Vredeoes and Skoonvlei and Welgemeend, then past Welkom and Visgat and Bokveldskloof and Vaalbult and Kolen River, afterwards Groenfontein and De Hoek and Wadrif, to Op-die-Berg and Remhoogte and Wyekloof; apart from all the fountains: Merriesfontein and Koperfontein and Gansfontein and Kleinfontein and Doornfontein.

  By the time the day starts to draw its ears up into its neck as the sun grows red with weariness and shame, Meester de la Bat at long last orders Labyn to rein in the horses at a farm where he has to deliver some court papers, and there they are invited to stay for the night – the Meester in the house with the farmer and his family, Labyn and Philida in an empty stable outside in the yard. Without Willempie, Philida’s breasts are painful but there happens to be a slave woman who has twin babies and can do with some milk, so Philida can provide some relief.

  Very early the next morning they set out again, and on the way back, just where the road narrows to leave the Bokkeveld, they stop at a strange thing which they’d passed the previous afternoon when everybody was too tired to pay attention. But this time they stop to have a proper inspection. At first Philida thinks it must be a scarecrow, like the thing they used to put up in the vineyards at Zandvliet to scare off the flocks of birds that fed on the bunches of grapes in the early summer.

  Except this is not a scarecrow.

  The three of them get off to follow the Meester for a closer look. It is a long iron pole, painted red, with something stuck on top.

  Only when they come right up to it Philida can make out what it is: a human skull, dirty and dilapidated, with very little of it left. A tuft of hair here and there on the bare white bone. Two hollows of eye sockets staring into nothingness.

  And this? asks Philida, when it looks as if no one else is going to speak.

  This, says Meester de la Bat, this is the Galant some people in the Bokkeveld still have nightmares about.

  I think I hear about him from Ouma Nella, says Philida.

  That is possible, says the Meester. Galant was a slave here. He did terrible things.

  Is this the Galant that make a rebellion against the farmers of the Bokkeveld?

  He was a very famous man, says old Labyn quietly, almost reverentially. Everybody in this Colony knows about him.

  Meester de la Bat clears his throat. Today most people have forgotten about him, he says sternly. And well they should. But about seven years ago he conducted a reign of terror in these parts.

  What’s he doing here? asks Philida. And what are we doing here?

  I wanted you to come and see. As I just said, this Galant led a slave rebellion against the white people some years back. He and his followers killed three of them. Then they were caught and taken to the Caab to appear in court, and brought back here to be executed. Two were hanged, and their heads were stuck on poles here in the Bokkeveld, for all to see what happens when slaves try to rise up against their lawful masters. They were left here – one in this place, the other one at the far end of the Bokkeveld, to be consumed by time and the birds of heaven.

  Is this really necessary? asks Philida.

  Is what necessary?

  Everything. The hanging. Putting the heads on the poles. And travelling all day yesterday and today just so that we can come and look at this thing.

  This one, says Meester de la Bat, this one was the gang leader, Galant. And as you can see, he is still here.

  Again Labyn speaks: Is this so that the people can see or to make them angry?

  Labyn, says Meester de la Bat.

  I’m just asking, Baas, says Labyn.

  Meester de la Bat gathers up the long flaps of his black coat and struts off with his stiff secretary-bird steps, back to the cart.

  What about the others? asks Philida behind him.

  The white man stops to look back. Which others?

  The ones that wasn’t hanged. You say there was others.

  Yes, there were others that were also punished. I told you there was another one that was put up at the top corner of the Bokkeveld. And a third one who was hanged but his head wasn’t put up on a pole. And then five more. They were tied to the gallows when the three leaders were hanged. Afterwards they were taken to a stake where they were flogged and branded. And then they were locked up in the jail behind the Drostdy in Worcester for hard labour, three for life, and two others – their names were Achilles and Ontong – for fifteen years.

  So they must still be there, says Philida.

  They must be there, says the Meester. And I’m sure they’ll be there for a long time still.

  He suddenly seems to be in a hurry. Come, he says. It is time to go back.

  Wrapped in her own thoughts, Philida wonders: Those five. Perhaps they were the ones who cleaned up the Drostdy square on the day of the auction, and swept up the cowpats and the turds. But if you really think about it, nothing has been cleared up at all.

  The sun is sinking. Against the blood red of the scarecrow pole one can see the dirty white skull, looking out across the empty world with its empty eyes. As if he is anxious to take everything in. From here, for all one can tell, all the way to the Caab. To the sea, to the other side of the sea. To all the places in the world where there are still slaves and people who know about slaves. Those eye hollows, Philida thinks, they miss nothing, they won’t ever miss anything, they’re too big, too empty. Eye hollows that stare through day and night. Eye holes that know and that will never stop knowing.

  Thank you that Meester came to show me again, Labyn says demurely next to her. This truly was a great man, I heard a lot about him and I’m glad every time I can see him. To Philida he says: Maybe we can look up the other five in the Drostdy sometime. He turns back to the scarecrow and makes a small bow in his direction. Good day, Galant.

  Philida sits unmoving in her corner of the cart. What she thinks is: How little remains of a man. A sliver of bone. Two hollows for eyes. But as long as they still can look, perhaps nothing has been in vain.
This man Galant was here, and now we came all this way, a whole day, to get here to him. Perhaps, in a way, it was worthwhile after all. It’s too early to be sure. But will we ever know?

  And without meaning to, she can hear her own voice speaking quietly into the wind, a wind which after the oven-hot day suddenly comes blowing ice cold against her face. Good day, Galant, she says. And deep inside her head, without knowing exactly what it is she is thinking, conscious only of Labyn’s comforting arm around her, she murmurs: Yes, it was good to see you.

  But the day is far from over. Somewhere along the road they have to outspan and spend the night in the veld before they can drive on the next day, all the way through the long emptiness, back to Worcester, back to home.

  XIX

  In which Labyn reveals himself as a Storyteller of Note and introduces Philida to a holy Man who will be with her for the rest of her Life

  AFTER THAT RIDE to the Bokkeveld Philida starts spending more and more of her free time with Labyn. There are often only the two of them, usually at his workshop where the wood smells settle in one’s nose. But the children loved being there too. For Lena there is always some little wooden thing to play with, while Willempie is usually happy to lie on the floor on a kaross, playing with his toes, or otherwise in an abbadoek on Labyn’s back. Many times Kleinkat comes to play with small cut-offs or tools, with a mouse or a butterfly she has caught outside, or with the fantasy friends she finds everywhere. To Labyn’s great pleasure she is particularly partial to olive wood, and can spend hours in his workroom, playing in wood shavings, or rubbing herself luxuriously against newly sawn olive boards. Otherwise, she simply sits and cleans or preens herself, one hind leg stretched out past her head, or with her pink nose under her tail to reach her little arsehole. That is to say, until the day she disappears.